Senators question intelligence chiefs on Iraq WMD
Reuters via The Daily Times -- March 6, 2004
WASHINGTON: The Senate Intelligence Committee questioned the heads of the major US intelligence agencies behind closed doors on Thursday about prewar estimates on Iraqi weapons programs, which critics say showed a stronger threat than what was discovered after the US-led invasion.
The directors of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, flanked by staff, met with the Senate panel that is drafting a report expected to criticize the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Blair wants more pre-emptive military strikes
ABC News Online -- March 6, 2004
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, battling to shake off the damaging controversy of the Iraq war, has called for a shake-up of the United Nations and suggested international law may needed changing to allow pre-emptive military strikes.
Blair lacked critical thinking, says Blix
The Guardian -- March 6, 2004
Richard Norton-Taylor and David Leigh
Hans Blix, the UN's former chief weapons inspector, last night delivered a robust critique of Tony Blair's defence of the invasion of Iraq, questioning the prime minister's judgment, especially his response to claims made by the intelligence agencies.
Kennedy says Bush deceived U.S. into Iraq
Accusation of 'fear mongering' signals new wave of criticism by Democrats
New York Times via San Francisco Chronicle -- March 6, 2004
Douglas Jehl
Washington -- Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered a blistering indictment Friday of President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, accusing Bush of deliberately exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.
U.S., Certain That Iraq Had Illicit Arms, Reportedly Ignored Contrary Reports
New York Times -- March 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON — In the two years before the war in Iraq, American intelligence agencies reviewed but ultimately dismissed reports from Iraqi scientists, defectors and other informants who said Saddam Hussein's government did not possess illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The reports, which ran contrary to the conclusions of the intelligence agencies and the Bush administration, were not acknowledged publicly by top government officials before the invasion last March. In public statements, the agencies and the administration cited only reports from informants who supported the view that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, which the administration cited as a main justification for going to war.
The first public hint of those reports came in a speech on Friday by Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, she said "indications" were emerging from the panel's inquiry into prewar intelligence that "potential sources may have been dismissed because they were telling us something we didn't want to believe: that Iraq had no active W.M.D. programs."
Other government officials said they knew of several occasions from 2001 to 2003 when Iraqi scientists, defectors and others had told American intelligence officers, their foreign partners or other intelligence agents that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons.
The officials said they believed that intelligence agencies had dismissed the reports because they did not conform to a view, held widely within the administration and among intelligence analysts, that Iraq was hiding an illicit arsenal.
The Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment directly on Ms. Harman's remarks. But an intelligence official said: "Human intelligence offering different views was by no means discounted or ignored. It was considered and weighed against all the other information available, and analysts made their best judgments."
The government officials who described the contradictory reports have detailed knowledge of prewar intelligence on Iraq and were critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of the information. Because the information remains classified, the officials declined to discuss the identity of the sources in any detail, but said they believed the informants' views had been dismissed because they challenged the widely held consensus on Iraq's weapons.
"It appears that the human intelligence wasn't deemed interesting or useful if it was exculpatory of Iraq," said one senior government official with detailed knowledge of the prewar intelligence.
A second senior government official, who confirmed that account, said the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons had been "treated like a religion" within American intelligence agencies, with alternative views never given serious attention. The officials said they could not quantify the reports.
In a speech at Georgetown University last month, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, acknowledged for the first time that intelligence agencies might have been mistaken about whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons. None have been found yet.
Mr. Tenet said it was too soon to make final judgments. But he also defended intelligence analysts' performance, saying that they had not been swayed by political pressure and that "as intelligence professionals, we go where the information takes us."
He met Friday morning in a closed session with members of the House intelligence committee, as part of its inquiry into the prewar intelligence. In another closed session on the subject on Thursday, he spent more than four hours with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, issued a statement describing "a frank and useful exchange."
Senator Roberts said the committee hoped "sometime in the next several weeks" to issue an "initial report" based on its inquiry, which has focused on whether findings by intelligence agencies were supported by adequate evidence.
Among the reports that were discounted, the senior government officials said, was at least one account from an Iraqi scientist who said mysterious trailers described by other Iraqi defectors as part of a biological weapons program were for another, benign purpose, which the officials would not describe.
In prewar presentations and documents, including the unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, the intelligence agencies and the administration cited only human intelligence reports supporting the view that the trailers were for biological weapons.
An unclassified report issued in May by the C.I.A., which is still on the agency's Web site, concluded that the trailers had indeed been for biological weapons. But in the months since the war, most American intelligence analysts have come to believe that the trailers were not for that purpose, and were probably for making hydrogen for weather balloons, according to senior government officials. In testimony before Congress late last month, Mr. Tenet said the intelligence community was divided on the issue.
In the past month, some senior intelligence officials have acknowledged that some information from human sources on Iraq was mishandled, including reports based on interviews in early 2002 with an Iraqi defector who later that year was labeled a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The information the defector provided was nevertheless included in the administration's statements, including the October 2002 intelligence assessment and Mr. Powell's speech. Intelligence officials have described the inclusion as a mistake.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Kennedy Says Bush Exaggerated Threat Posed by Saddam Hussein
VOA -- 6 Mar 2004
Nick Simeone
Washington --
One of the U.S. Senate's most senior Democrats is accusing President Bush of exaggerating the threat that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed to the world. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy used a speech Friday to question why CIA Director George Tenet waited until last month to say that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction did not pose an imminent danger.
[Pre-war Trailers of Mass Desctruction claims based on hearsay.
Post-war TMD claims based on specious assessment.]
Experts Say U.S. Never Spoke to Source of Tip On Bioweapons
Information From Iraqi Relayed By Foreign Agency, CIA Notes
Washington Post -- March 5, 2004
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Bush administration's prewar assertion that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of mobile labs that could produce bioweapons rested largely on information from an Iraqi defector working with another government who was never interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers, according to current and former senior intelligence officials and congressional experts who have studied classified documents.
In his presentation before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said "firsthand descriptions" of the mobile bioweapons fleet had come from an Iraqi chemical engineer who had defected and is "currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him."
The claims about the mobile facilities remain unverified, however, and now U.S. officials are trying to get access to the Iraqi engineer to verify his story, the sources said, particularly because intelligence officials have discovered that he is related to a senior official in Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who actively encouraged the United States to invade Iraq.
Powell also cited another defector in his speech, an Iraqi major who was made available to U.S. officials by the INC, as supporting the engineer's story. The major, however, had already been "red-flagged" by the Defense Intelligence Agency as having provided questionable information about Iraq's mobile biological program. But DIA analysts did not pass along that cautionary note, and the major was cited in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and was mentioned in Powell's speech, officials said.
The administration's handling of intelligence alleging the existence of mobile bioweapons facilities has become part of several broad investigations now underway into the intelligence community's faulty prewar conclusions that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Senate and House intelligence committees are conducting probes, as are the CIA and a commission appointed by President Bush.
The investigation of claims about mobile weapons labs, however, does not just cover prewar intelligence, but also includes the performance of the intelligence community well after the invasion.
U.S. intelligence officials now describe as hasty and premature the May 28 public claim by the CIA and the DIA that two semitrailers discovered in Iraq in April were most likely part of the bioweapons fleet. [ed. Ya think?!]
The highly publicized claim, one official said, was triggered by a May 11 NBC News broadcast featuring David Kay, then a network analyst in Iraq, who would later become the chief U.S. weapons inspector there. Kay was shown next to one of the found vehicles with a chemical officer from the Army's 101st Airborne Division who, on camera, agreed that the semitrailer was equipped to make biological weapons.
Days later in Washington, the CIA and the DIA put out an unclassified white paper that said the production of biological agents "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles." The next day, Bush said the trailers showed that the United States had found former Iraqi president Hussein's prohibited weapons. "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong," Bush said. "We found them."
Since then, intelligence analysts and Kay, a nuclear-weapons expert with little experience with biological weapons, have said the trailers were probably not used in a bioweapons program. Kay has said he believes the trailers were likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.
CIA Director George J. Tenet is expected to face questions today about the alleged mobile bioweapons fleet and other elements of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs when he appears in a closed session of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He appeared before the Senate intelligence committee in closed session yesterday.
The Senate committee has drafted a highly critical report on the prewar intelligence of the CIA and other agencies. The problems uncovered in the mobile-bioweapons area illustrate what the panel has found in the collection and analysis of information about Iraq's chemical and nuclear programs.
Tenet has already disclosed that the agency has changed some procedures as a result of the problems discovered by its reviews. For example, there are new procedures on how to handle material flagged as coming from questionable sources, such as the Iraqi major. CIA analysts are now to be given more information from the CIA's operations division to help them assess the reliability of those who provide information.
CIA officials reviewing the bioweapons intelligence say that the engineer who provided the original tip never dealt directly with U.S. intelligence agencies, and that he passed along the information through a foreign intelligence service, which they refuse to name. U.S. intelligence analysts did not know his name before the war, relying entirely on foreign officials to vouch for his credibility, according to a former CIA employee as well as administration and congressional sources.
U.S. officials are trying to interview him, sources said, but the foreign intelligence service that originally forwarded his information has declined to produce him for questioning.
The May 28 white paper on the semitrailers is also under scrutiny. A retired senior intelligence official said recently that the unclassified paper was hastily put together before a full, classified analysis was written and circulated within the intelligence community.
The paper was produced so quickly, one senior administration official said, because of Kay's May appearance on NBC, in which he pointed to one semitrailer and said: "This is where the biological process took place . . . literally, there's nothing else you would do this way in a mobile facility."
Kay said he returned to Iraq as a U.S. weapons inspector a month after his television appearances and found that the DIA analysts who had inspected the trailers disagreed that they were part of mobile biological-agent production plants. By January, Kay had reassessed the matter, saying publicly that the "intelligence consensus" was that the semitrailers probably were for making hydrogen, not biological agents.
Administration officials continued to describe the threat posed by Hussein's mobile biological-weapons facilities.
On Jan. 22, Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio that Hussein had "spent time and effort acquiring biological weapons labs" and that the semitrailers "were, in fact, part of that program." He called the trailers "conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Hussein] did in fact have programs of mass destruction."
On Feb. 24, Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that there was "a big debate" about the trailers among CIA analysts "who still believe that they were for" bioweapons, and CIA and DIA analysts "who have posited another theory . . . and we haven't wrestled it to the ground yet."
Tenet said he had talked to Cheney and learned that his January statement was based on "an older judgment."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
[The 11th of September justifies anything.]
Blair warns of WMD terror threat
CNN International -- March 5, 2004
LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned of the "real" threat of international terrorism and how it has to be confronted at all costs.
["It ain't on me. Those shmucks shouldn't have believed our lies."]
Iraq's Chalabi Says 'Blame CIA, Not Me' About WMD
Reuters -- March 5, 2004
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi says he is tired of being blamed for misleading the United States about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and points the finger instead at the CIA in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" to be aired on Sunday.
Chalabi, who heads the Iraqi National Congress exile group and has close ties to the Bush administration, says the CIA should have done a better job analyzing information received from defectors he steered their way.
"This is a ridiculous situation," says Chalabi, who still maintains that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq.
Chalabi said the CIA knew defectors can be biased and that even the press was saying "'defectors have an ax to grind, don't believe them."'
"Now you're telling me that despite all this public evidence, the United States government took our word without checking out the people?" Chalabi said incredulously .
"Intelligence people who are supposed to do a better job for their country and their government did not do such a good job."
Chalabi, who was born into a prominent Iraqi family but spent 45 years outside Iraq before returning in April, denies coaching defectors, something the CIA believe he's done for years, according to a former CIA analyst interviewed on the show.
The analyst, Ken Pollack, who now works for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and for CNN, said the Bush administration used the information to label Iraq an imminent threat.
Pollack said they were looking "to simply confirm a preconceived notion of an extremely threatening Iraq ... on the cusp of acquiring the most advanced ... dangerous weapons."
Pollack blames senior U.S. officials, not Chalabi.
"This is one of those ... 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me,"' said Pollack. "Chalabi has a track record. We knew this guy wasn't telling us the truth."
A defiant Chalabi said he was eager to further defend himself.
"I want to be asked to testify in the United States Senate in the Intelligence Committee. I want to do this in an open session," he says.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Seeking subpoenas
McCain and Bush clash on powers, scope of intel probe
The Hill -- March 4, 2004
By Alexander Bolton
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations.
The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer
Admit WMD mistake, survey chief tells Bush
The Guardian -- March 3, 2004
Julian Borger in Washington
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.
[Seen at Cursor.]
Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida
Knight Ridder Washington Bureau -- March 2, 2004
By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.
[White House abandons War on Terror to focus on Invasion of Iraq. Seen at Buzzflash.]
Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind
MSNBC -- March 2, 2004
Abu Musab Zarqawi blamed for more than 700 killings in Iraq
By Jim Miklaszewski, Correspondent, NBC News
Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET March 02, 2004
With Tuesday’s attacks, Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, is now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq.
But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.
And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today.
A Tale of Two Intelligence Estimates
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- March 2004
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq is frequently portrayed as the result of either intelligence failures or misrepresentation of the intelligence by others. In fact, both were involved. It appears that a third factor was involved as well: misrepresentation of intelligence by the intelligence community itself.
The Editorial Pages and the Case for War
Did Our Leading Newspapers Set Too Low a Bar for a Preemptive Attack?
Columbia Journalism Review -- March/April 2004
BY CHRIS MOONEY
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now infamous presentation to the United Nations concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and its ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. At the time, many journalists, members of Congress, and key Security Council nations remained unconvinced of the necessity of invading Iraq. Laced with declassified satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and information gleaned from Iraqi defectors, Powell’s speech sought to bolster the Bush administration’s case for war by demonstrating an “accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior” on Iraq’s part. And it enjoyed a strikingly warm reception from one key U.S. audience: the editorial page writers of major newspapers.
“Irrefutable,” declared The Washington Post. Powell “may not have produced a ‘smoking gun,’” added The New York Times, but his speech left “little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.” Similar assessments came from four other editorial pages that cjr chose to examine — the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Many foreign papers viewed Powell’s presentation more skeptically, but the endorsements from these six leading domestic editorial boards — four of which would ultimately support the war — strengthened Bush’s hand considerably. “If and when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it’s just about a done deal, because the public will fall in line,” says David Domke, a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle who has studied editorial page response to 9/11 and the Iraq war.
New Canberra probe into WMD intel
CNN -- March 1, 2004
By CNN's Grant Holloway
CANBERRA, Australia -- The Australian government has ordered an independent inquiry into the intelligence advice provided on the threat posed by Iraq to world security.
An Australian parliamentary inquiry report, released Monday, criticized the advice provided to the government on Iraq and recommended an independent assessment of the issue.
In a statement released Monday, Prime Minister John Howard said his government accepted the recommendation and also that the assessment should be carried out by an experienced former intelligence expert.
Howard said he would name the person to carry out the inquiry, and the terms of reference, shortly.
Australia staunchly supported the invasion of Iraq -- providing troops and equipment -- as a necessary pre-emptive strike to destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program.
No WMD stockpiles have been discovered in Iraq, however, since the invasion began 11 months ago, creating pressure on the Australian government to justify its decision.
The parliamentary inquiry found that Australian intelligence agencies may have "overstated" the case for Iraq's WMD, but added that they were "more moderate and cautious than those of the partner agencies in the U.S. and the UK."
The committee said the government should review its intelligence agencies and in particular it should assess the capacity of the Office of National Assessments (ONA) which specifically provides advice to the prime minister.
The committee found that the ONA was "more ready to extrapolate a threatening scenario from historical experience" and more ready to accept "new and mostly untested intelligence" than other Australian agencies.
The ONA was thrown into the spotlight in March last year following the resignation of one of its officers Andrew Wilkie amid a blaze of publicity.
Wilkie quit in protest over what he described as the government's misuse of information provided by the agency.
And last August, Wilkie told a senate inquiry into the Iraq war that key words from ONA reports, which qualified the veracity of intelligence reports on Iraq's WMDs, had been removed by the prime minister's office.
They had been replaced by more emotive language which supported the government's position on the threat of Iraq, he said at the time.
But Monday's report largely absolves the government from any blame in the situation saying there was "no evidence that political pressure was applied to the (intelligence) agencies" and that is presentation of evidence had been "consistent, moderate and measured".
The report's findings matched those of the Hutton inquiry in Britain, which cleared Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of "sexing up" intelligence to justify the war.
"The government stands by its presentation of the case for disarming Iraq of its WMD capabilities," Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said in a statement Monday.
Evidence collected since the conflict began showed Saddam "was pursuing WMD programs and that his regime was concealing these activities from U.N. inspectors," Downer said.
Tories withdraw from WMD inquiry
The Scotsman -- 1 March 2004
Brendan O'Brien
Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, has announced his party has withdrawn from the Butler inquiry into intelligence failures in the assessment of Iraq’s WMD capability.
Mr Howard said his party withdrew their support because of the limited nature of the inquiry. Lord Butler’s committee will focus on structures and systems rather than individuals.
In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Howard expressed his dissatisfaction on what he regards as a narrower interpretation of the inquiry’s terms of references than the two leaders had agreed to. "Lord Butler has chosen to interpret his terms of reference in what I regard as an unacceptably restrictive fashion," he said.
The withdrawal of Conservative participation will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the inquiry which has now become a one party affair. The Liberal Democrats refused to support the inquiry from the outset.
However, when challenged a prime ministerial spokesman said the inquiry would continue regardless.
"This is an independent inquiry looking independently at the issues and it has a broad-based membership. Whether others choose to be a part of it or not is a matter for them, but this inquiry will continue," he said.
Iraq statements were conservative: Hill
AAP via ninemsn.com.au -- 25 February 2004
The federal government had been conservative in statements it made before the war on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Defence Minister Robert Hill said.
[Quotations from speech at U of Edinburgh, comments from interview in Stern, mention of forthcoming book.]
Blix says war 'without foundation'
Ireland Online -- 24 February 2004
The justification for last year’s war in Iraq “was without foundation“, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspection team in the country said tonight.
The armed invasion damaged the credibility of the states which went to war and the authority of the United Nations Security Council, Hans Blix said, addressing an audience of 1,000 at the University of Edinburgh.
In taking armed action, America and Britain “ignored the views of the majority” on the Security Council and the net result was a “loss of legitimacy” for that action, he said.
He said that there was “great relief” that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been eliminated, but described the evolution towards democracy in Iraq as “uncertain“.
Dr Blix’s inspection teams were unable to make significant weapons finds in Iraq in the months leading up to the war.
He said: “The justification for the war – the existence of weapons of mass destruction – was without foundation.
“The military operation was successful, but the diagnosis was wrong.
“Saddam was dangerous to his own people but not a great, and certainly not an immediate, danger to his neighbours and the world.
“The states which we would have expected to support and strengthen some basic principles of the UN order, in my view, set a precedent of ignoring or undermining this order by acting too impatiently and without the support of the Security Council.
“As a result, their own credibility has suffered and the authority of the UN Security Council has been damaged.”
Earlier in his speech, Dr Blix criticised the US and the UK for trusting their own intelligence more than that of the weapons inspectors, who had not found the existence of any “smoking gun” and who had searched a number of sites and “in no case” found any weapon of mass destruction.
The action in Iraq has not strengthened confidence that intelligence is reliable, and it has proved that independent international inspection is more reliable than national intelligence, Dr Blix added.
He said: “It is easy to agree that there was uncertainty about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in March 2003.
“However, certainty, not uncertainty, was the justification advanced for the armed action.
“The governments undertaking the armed action put exclamation marks where there should have been question marks.
“We would like to be told about the real world, not to be shown a virtual one.”
Earlier today, Dr Blix was quoted in German weekly Stern as saying that the US and Britain “created facts where there were no facts” in the run up to war.
“The war was not justified,” he reportedly said. “The United States needed weapons of mass destruction to be able to wage the war.”
Tonight, the former chief weapons inspector launched a staunch defence of the role of the UN in international diplomacy, calling it the “most important multilateral church in the global village“, adding that “the legitimacy it can confer is far greater than any ad hoc alliances of willing states“.
And despite his reservations about the reliability of intelligence, he said that one lesson to be learned from the Iraq conflict was that “cooperation between national intelligence and international inspection was needed for the best result.”
He said: “International inspection supported by, but not remotely controlled by, national authorities, including intelligence, can be an increasingly important instrument in the struggle of the international community against the further spread of weapons of mass destruction.”
Dr Blix received a standing ovation after his speech.
He was speaking as part of a public lecture on the theme of Means of Reducing the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
A chair in International Relations was established in the Faculty of Law of the University of Edinburgh in 1947.
Single lectures or seminars are given by a notable public figure who is known as The Montague Burton Visiting Professor during his or her brief stay in Edinburgh.
Dr Blix’s book, Disarming Iraq, which recounts the process of weapons of inspections in the country, is due out next month.
Ex-CIA analyst rebukes administration on WMD
The Daily Iowan -- February 23, 2004
By Mary Beth LaRue - The Daily Iowan
A critic of President Bush's international policies presented footage to approximately 700 people in the IMU Sunday night in which Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell denied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction prior to the war in Iraq.
After showing the footage from the documentary Breaking the Silence, former CIA analyst and Iraq intelligence expert Raymond McGovern asked the audience, "How many were aware that Rice and Powell said this?"
Approximately 10 people raised their hands.
"Why didn't the reporters find this?" he said. "Why didn't Americans know?"
McGovern, along with FBI agent Coleen Rowley, addressed national-defense issues during a free public lecture concerning the war Iraq and the Patriot Act.
McGovern contended that the director of the CIA and the chief U.S. weapons inspector have offered very different explanations on why no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been found.
"Why were we reluctant to say there were no weapons of mass destruction?" he said. "We couldn't believe our own president was lying to us through his teeth."
He believes that the government cynically exploited Americans' trauma over 9/11 to persuade them it was necessary to attack Iraq.
"It's sad to say we cannot give him the benefit of the doubt," he said.
Iowa native Rowley, now an FBI special agent in Minneapolis, is the author of a highly publicized May 2002 memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller. She felt the FBI had made mistakes in the months leading up to 9/11. Later that year, Time called her the "public conscience" of the FBI in an article naming her as one of the three "People of the Year," along with Sherron Watkins and Cynthia Cooper.
"We have two views on the Patriot Act," Rowley said. "One is Orwell's Big Brother saying that we're under a microscope, and the other is 'Trust us, we're the government.' "
Clarifying that most have not even read the entire Patriot Act, which contains 160 different laws, she cited a few of the main laws Americans should pay attention to, including the court order for third-party records, the "sneak and peek warrant," and domestic terrorism.
"The Patriot Act isn't a problem. It's the way it's enforced - the mentality and the fear factor," she said. "It stifles debate and stops talk about hard issues while making us more susceptible to making mistakes."
The UI Lecture Committee said bringing Rowley and McGovern to the university exposed students to new ideas.
"Offering an intellectual examination of the most important current events - war, civil liberties, and intelligence - is simply not available in the mainstream press but is an opportunity the University Lecture Committee provides the university community," said UI sophomore Chad Aldeman, the group's financial director. "It is the best investment we can possibly make of student fees to give back to the students."
Democrat Says CIA Didn't Give UN All Iraq WMD Data
Reuters -- 23 February 2004
By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON - A Democratic senator accused CIA Director George Tenet on Monday of making false statements when he said during public hearings that his agency gave the United Nations information about all the top suspected weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq before the war.
"All such sites were not shared, and Mr. Tenet's repeated statements were false," Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said in a speech on the Senate floor.
The CIA last month declassified the number of top suspected WMD sites categorized as high and medium priority, and acknowledged that 21 of those 105 sites were not shared with the United Nations before the war, Levin said.
A U.S. intelligence official countered that nine of those 21 sites had been "frequently" visited by U.N. inspectors between 1991 and 1999 and they knew as much about them as the CIA. Three of the sites were added to the CIA's list after Iraq declared them to the United Nations, and three sites were duplicate entries, the official told Reuters.
The CIA did not know the precise locations of several other sites and efforts were being made to develop more data on them, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Levin said if the public had known that not all WMD site information had been shared with U.N. weapons inspectors it might have reinforced sentiment that U.N. inspections should be completed before going to war.
"I can only speculate as to Director Tenet's motive," said Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a member of the intelligence committee.
"In other words, honest answers by Director Tenet might have undermined the false sense of urgency for proceeding to war and could have contributed to delay, neither of which fit the administration's policy goals," Levin said.
Prewar intelligence on Iraq has become a key issue in this year's presidential election campaign, with Democrats suggesting the Republican White House exaggerated the threat to build its case for war.
"We provided the best information that we had and the notion that we held back information that would have been useful is simply wrong," the U.S. intelligence official said.
"The U.S. certainly did not hold back timely actionable intelligence information from the (U.N.) inspectors," he said.
[Seen at CEIP. This is an excellent article.]
Officials: U.S. still paying millions to group that provided false Iraqi intelligence
Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau -- February 21, 2004
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott
WASHINGTON - The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.
The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified.
The continuing support for the INC comes amid seven separate investigations into pre-war intelligence that Iraq was hiding illicit weapons and had links to al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. A probe by the Senate Intelligence Committee is now examining the INC's role.
The decision not to shut off funding for the INC's information gathering effort could become another liability for Bush as the presidential campaign heats up and, furthermore suggests that some within the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq's political future.
Chalabi, who built close ties to officials in Vice President Cheney's office and among top Pentagon officials, is on the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of 25 Iraqis installed by the United States to help administer the country following the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April.
The former businessman, who lobbied for years for a U.S.-backed military effort to topple Saddam, is publicly committed to making peace with Israel and providing bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East for use by U.S. forces fighting the war on terrorism.
The INC's Information Collection Program started in 2001 and was "designed to collect, analyze and disseminate information" from inside Iraq, according to a letter the group sent in June 2002 to the staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Some of the INC's information alleged that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program, which was destroyed by U.N. inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War, and was stockpiling banned chemical and biological weapons, according to the letter.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.
The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.
The INC also supplied information from its collection program to leading news organizations in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, according to the letter to the Senate committee staff.
The State Department and the CIA, which soured on Chalabi in the 1990s, viewed the INC's information as highly unreliable because it was coming from a source with a strong self-interest in convincing the United States to topple Saddam.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has concluded since the invasion that defectors turned over by the INC provided little worthwhile information, and that at least one of them, the source of an allegation that Saddam had mobile biological warfare laboratories, was a fabricator. A defense official said the INC did provide some valuable material on Saddam's military and security apparatus.
Even so, dubious INC-supplied information found its way into the Bush administration's arguments for war, which included charges that Saddam was concealing illicit arms stockpiles and was supporting al-Qaida.
No illicit weapons have yet been found, and senior U.S. officials say there is no compelling evidence that Saddam cooperated with al-Qaida to attack Americans.
The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the DIA, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department decided to give it up in late 2002.
The defense official defended the current support of the INC effort, saying that it has been of some help to the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, a team that is trying to determine what happened to Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
INC-supplied informants also have identified insurgents who have been waging a guerrilla war that has claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. troops and hundreds of Iraqis, he said.
"To call all of it (INC intelligence) useless is too negative," said the defense official, who described the Information Collection Program as a "massive" undertaking.
"You never take anything at face value," he continued. "When the INC gives information, we absolutely pursue it. You never know what that golden nugget is going to be."
But a senior administration official questioned whether the United States should still be funding the program.
"A huge amount of what was collected hasn't panned out," he said. "Some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated."
The senior administration official also sought to justify the initial decision to support the program.
Prior to the invasion, U.S. intelligence agencies had no better human sources in Iraq, and had no choice but to rely on the INC, minority Kurdish guerrilla groups and other sources who claimed to have knowledge of Saddam's illegal arms programs, ties to terrorist groups and his military forces, he said.
"The evidence now suggests that at some points along the way, we may have been duped by people who wanted to encourage military action for their own reasons," he conceded.
Chalabi apparently is less concerned about the past
"We are heroes in error," Chalabi was quoted as saying recently in Baghdad by The Daily Telegraph of London. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."
In a related development, U.S. officials said that on top of the Pentagon funds, Chalabi's organization asked the State Department in August for $5 million in unspent financing that was approved by Congress before the war.
The $5 million has not been released, they said.
The request for the money follows the awarding to the INC of $3.1 million in April 2003 following the fall of Baghdad, according to a State Department statement.
State Department lawyers questioned the decision to turn over the $3.1 million, said a State Department official. But senior aides, anticipating an outcry from Chalabi's supporters in the administration and in Congress, opted to release the money, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime
The Telegraph -- 19 February 2004
By Jack Fairweather in Baghdad and Anton La Guardia
An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator.
Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Ahmad Chalabi: 'we've been entirely successful'
Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.
"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."
His comments are likely to inflame the debate on both sides of the Atlantic over the quality of pre-war intelligence, and the spin put on it by President George W Bush and Tony Blair as they argued for military action.
US officials said last week that one of the most celebrated pieces of false intelligence, the claim that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological weapons laboratories, had come from a major in the Iraqi intelligence service made available by the INC.
US officials at first found the information credible and the defector passed a lie-detector test. But in later interviews it became apparent that he was stretching the truth and had been "coached by the INC".
He failed a second polygraph test and in May 2002, intelligence agencies were warned that the information was unreliable.
But analysts missed the warning, and the mobile laboratory story remained firmly established in the catalogue of alleged Iraqi violations until months after the overthrow of Saddam.
America claimed to have found two mobile laboratories, but the lorries in fact held equipment to make hydrogen for weather balloons.
Last week, US State Department officials admitted that much of the first-hand testimony they had received was "shaky".
"What the INC told us formed one part of the intelligence picture," a senior official in Baghdad said. "But what Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith. Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives."
Mr Chalabi is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, but his star in Washington has waned.